Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Hitchens on the "Real Sunni Triangle"

These two paragraphs include arguments that finally convinced me to support the Iraq War some two years ago:

Many people write as if the sectarian warfare in Iraq was caused bycoalition intervention. But it is surely obvious that the struggle for masteryhas been going on for some time and was only masked by the apparently iron unityimposed under Baathist rule. That rule was itself the dictatorship of a tribalTikriti minority of the Sunni minority and constituted a veneer over thedivisions beneath, as well as an incitement to their perpetuation. The Kurds hadalready withdrawn themselves from this divide-and-rule system by the time thecoalition forces arrived, while Shiite grievances against the state were decadesold and had been hugely intensified by Saddam's cruelty. Nothing was going tostop their explosion, and if Saddam Hussein's regime had been permitted to runits course and to devolve (if one can use such a mild expression) into thesuccessorship of Udai and Qusai, the resulting detonation would have been evenmore vicious.

And into the power vacuum would have stepped not only Saudi Arabia andIran, each with its preferred confessional faction, but also Turkey, in pursuitof hegemony in Kurdistan. In other words, the alternative was never between atranquil if despotic Iraq and a destabilizing foreign intervention, but it was,rather, a race to see which kind of intervention there would be. Theinternational community in its wisdom decided to delay the issue until thealternatives were even fewer, but it is idle to pretend that Iraq was going toremain either unified or uninvaded after the destruction of its fabric as astate by three decades of fascism and war, including 12 years of demoralizingsanctions.

Though it was the genocide in Darfur, Sudan and the American Left's reaction to it that tipped me over the edge into the realm of right-wing neoconservatism some two and a half years ago, it is the arguments above that have convinced me to support America's intervention in Iraq.